The question of my research was 'How exhibition design can aim students designers to use sense of touch as an instrument to augment human`s perception?'

The first part of the project is haptic posters which need to be touched (or probably not, if somebody doesn`t want) and then the audience need to describe their emotions and answer some basic questions about what they thought when looking at them, touching and finally if their expectations were true.

Not every poster was made to touch it, for example 'pain receptors' red poster was expected not to be touched at all brcause of the needles and spiky glass pieces, but surprisingly people were aiming to touch it anyway. My expectations about human reactions nature were wrong, because of the simple thought: if you see something dangerous you probably won`t touch it, especially when I wasn`t pushing people to injure themselves. I couldn`t understand it when one of the testee students said that ''it seems dangerous but you can control it, that`s why you`re willing to touch it'.

The second part was the boxes with some unknown materials inside and people should put their hands and also touch it. As I expected some of testees didn`t want to do that first. Obscurity, even in such a small scale, was frightening them first and they needed to make sure that 'I hand`t put something dangerous or really ugly inside'. No, I didn`t :)

One of the most explored posters was the one that changes colour (lightens), reacting on temperature. But sometimes it just didn`t work because people having cold hands just couldn`t set the reaction of thermochromic paint. As they were touching it and nothing happened (later I explained them why) they were trying to warm their hands and touch the poster again as it was important for them to get the 'feedback' from it.

People`s reactions were unpredictable. Some of them were not surprised, or at least looked like that, some of them were really excited and involved into exploring the posters and the boxes. At the end of exploring all of the people were ask to complete small survey and their answers pushed me to explore the sense of touch and its psycology more.

Here is a small video documenting all the process. Enjoy !

Special thanks to all the guys from Highline Building, who took part in this project !